Transposition

In another one of Lewis's great sermons, "Transposition", he talks about a mother who gives birth to a son in a prison cell. As the boy grows his mother tries to describe the outside world by drawing pencil sketches. She tries to picture for him fields, rivers, fields, etc. And the boy for years gets along with these depictions. But then one day the mother realizes that the boy really thinks the world is filled with pencil lines. He can't imagine anything different. He does not understand what reality is really like. The shapes of the real works are not defined by lines, they "define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve.". As Lewis imagines our earthly lives in relation to our heavenly ones, he continues, "...we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.".
What a message of hope! We can't begin to imagine what reality really is! We aim short when we project our greatest pleasures onto heaven's landscape -- golf courses, fishing holes, beaches of powdery sand. These are just the pencil sketch. What awaits us is immeasurably greater. The fullness of time and the fullness of our selves! Hard to imagine and wait for!